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Book
Albert Memmi · 1953
Albert Memmi's The Pillar of Salt (1953) is the autobiographical novel of a Tunisian Jewish boy coming of age under French colonial rule, and its subject is the fracture colonialism opens in the self — caught between origins he cannot keep and a French world that will educate him but never admit him.
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What this book knows
A Tunisian Jewish boy's bildungsroman exposes how colonial identity fractures the self between origins one cannot keep and worlds that will not admit you.
self-and-identity
Just as I sat on the fence between two civilizations, so would I find myself between two classes; in trying to sit on several chairs, one generally lands on the floor.
MEM-PS-RC-090My sponsor had overlooked his limping, his difficult inner struggle, his accent he had only just managed to repress, his rejection of his whole identity.
MEM-PS-RC-079belonging
I learned with some displeasure that I shaved badly, that people remarked behind my back about my noticeably North-African accent and the violence of my language.
MEM-PS-RC-149He belonged nowhere. There was too great a diversity about him and he felt no urge to solve any particular problem.
MEM-PS-RC-160education-and-formation
We enjoyed the freedom of chatting together before being locked up for three hours within those mouse-grey walls; we came last but one on the hucksters' list.
MEM-PS-RC-032'The administration may change, but your file remains.' I felt within me the familiar collapse of everything I had tried to build.
MEM-PS-RC-272Illuminates
Editor’s framing
Memmi went on to become a major theorist of colonization, and this early novel is the lived ground the later theory grew from. The narrator, Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, carries a name that is itself a fracture — French, Jewish, Berber, Italian — and the book traces how an education that promises belonging instead deepens his exile from every community he comes from. The bildungsroman form, which usually ends in arrival, here ends in displacement: the formation produces a self at home nowhere.
What to attend to: the way learning becomes estrangement — each step into the colonizer's culture is a step away from his own, and the schooling that was supposed to lift him out leaves him suspended between worlds. The precision about the colonial double-bind, which Memmi would later theorize but renders here as experience. The loneliness, which is the affective center; this is a book about the cost of a formation that cannot deliver what it promised.
In Vela's reading The Pillar of Salt sits at the meeting of the erotic canon and the literature of formation, read on the learning axis above all: the rare bildungsroman in which education is the wound rather than the cure. We hold it beside the other accounts of selfhood made and unmade by the cultures that claim to form it.
Featured passage
Generally, we reached the old gateway long before school-time. We enjoyed the freedom of chatting together before being locked up for three hours within those mouse-grey walls. Besides, we met there all the quick-getaway hucksters who offered us all sorts of cheap dainties. They had learned, from long experience, to classify schools according to the purchasing power of the pupils. We certainly came last but one on their list, only just ahead of the other school of the Alliance that was situated in the heart of the ghetto and where the midday meal and even the clothes of the pupils were distributed free. That is why all these little tradesmen used to bring us whatever they had failed to sell at the gates of the other schools. In October, for instance, the small green apples that had fallen too soon from the tree and had been dipped in a sugar solution with red coloring. We licked the taffy crust until we reached the actual fruit, ate the fruit too, but pulled hideous faces as we did it, with our teeth on edge and our eyes grown dim. I had discovered that if one bit the taffy apple without first licking it the bitterness of the fruit was reduced by the sugar. But then I ate it all so fast that the pleasure was over before I had really experienced it. In spring, the fruit that was sold to us was already full of sunlight: yellow arbutus berries, the less expensive ones still greenish, big as marbles and all kernel, sharp to the taste and giving us belly-aches; the better fruit was of a fine golden yellow or bright red and tasted and smelled exquisitely sweet. Under the pressure of necessity, some of us had even learned to like the cheaper arbutus berries and to claim that they preferred them to the riper ones. To my great surprise, they chose those that were most green and most acid. But I never reached that stage, though some of my schoolmates may actually have been fortunate enough to like the green berries. Toward the same time of year, we were also offered the jujube fruits, small wild berries that were shiny as beads of brown marble or all wrinkled like the cheeks of an old woman, and much more attractive to look at than good to eat. Later, there were also oranges and dates, especially the big yellow dates that have an astringent effect on the mouth, leaving it all dry and resistant to any liquid.
Generally, we reached the old gateway long before school-time. We enjoyed the freedom of chatting together before being locked up for three hours within those mouse-grey walls.
6 published passages · book excerpt · research analysis
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